Altair Semiconductor leads 2010 worldwide LTE chipset rollout

HOD HASHARON, ISRAEL: Altair Semiconductor, a leading developer of ultra-low power, small footprint and high performance 4G LTE chipsets, announced year-end achievements for 2010, highlighted by the company's worldwide leadership position in commercializing 4G LTE chipsets for use in a wide-range of products, including USB modems, CPEs, Smartphones and handheld devices.

At Mobile World Congress in February 2010, Altair announced a strategic interoperability testing (IOT) cooperation with ZTE Corporation, which had successfully demonstrated one of the first commercial-grade LTE systems.

In July, Altair announced a partnership with IPWireless, a leading provider of 3GPP technology for new applications and markets, to develop a suite of multi-band LTE modem products that will support key frequency bands ideally suited to global LTE deployments.

Altair announced in November that it had been selected by Polish service provider Mobyland to power the first commercial-grade deployment available on a 1800MHz LTE network. The device, an LTE USB modem, supports multiple frequency bands including the 800MHz digital dividend band, 1800MHz and 2.5GHz.

Throughout 2010, Altair conducted extensive IOT with four tier-one infrastructure vendors in nine distinct LTE FDD/TDD bands, which included advanced system level testing with mobility and hand-over scenarios, while simultaneously demonstrating Category-3 throughputs of 100Mbps down and 50Mbs up.

"While 2010 has been a great year for Altair in terms of evolving our product line and maturing our solutions, the most exciting achievement is the fact that our technology is commercially-ready," said Eran Eshed, co-founder and VP of Marketing and Business Development at Altair Semiconductor.

"We've built a robust pipeline of customers which we will be announced as their products release to market and we look forward to continuing to lead the rollout of 4G LTE solutions in 2011, bringing the power of 4G to hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide."